The Board’s orders, instructions, guidelines and guidance notes — 397 documents from 2012 to 2026, of which 185 are written up here from the Board’s own PDF.
The Board publishes in more than one register. Its circulars explain the law to its officers and to the public. Its notifications are made under a power the Act gives, and within that power they are law. This third register is everything else the Board issues in its own name: orders under a section, instructions to its officers, guidelines, scheme FAQs, guidance notes, office memoranda and the occasional letter. The department keeps them together as its miscellaneous communications, and they are the working paperwork of the department — the least tidy of the three registers and, for anyone dealing with an assessment, often the most useful.
397 documents are listed here, from 2012 to 2026, with the department’s own recruitment and establishment notices left out because they are not tax material. 185 of them have been read from the Board’s own PDF and written up on a page of their own. 0 were published by the department as image-only scans with no text in them, so there was nothing to read; they are named in their year, and the reason is given. The remaining 212 are listed in their year with the department’s own file, so that nothing in the collection is hidden.
| Kind | Pages here |
|---|---|
| Order | 115 |
| Communication | 27 |
| Instruction | 20 |
| Guidelines | 13 |
| FAQs | 5 |
| Guidance note | 4 |
| Press release | 1 |
An order of the Board binds the department, not you and not a court. The Board writes to its own officers. An assessee may hold the department to an order or an instruction that helps him; the department cannot hold an assessee to one that hurts him, and the Tribunal and the courts decide the law for themselves. This is the most common mistake made with this material, and it is worth making twice: a direction of the Board is not a section of the Act.